Hanif Kureishi: One of the stories is consciously modelled on Chekhov. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

This isn't exactly a classic omnibus volume of short stories, but it shows how useful the form has been to Hanif Kureishi as a way of thinking against himself. The best pieces are the ones which enable him to operate far from his persona (beady-eyed outsider seething with self-belief).

Collected Stories

by
Hanif Kureishi

In "With Your Tongue Down My Throat", from his first book of stories, Love in a Blue Time (1997), he claims the point of view of Nina, a stubbornly delinquent teenager (two abortions down and no end in sight) equally estranged from her well-meaning teacher mother and the Pakistani father she so rarely sees. The narrative crackles and pops, hugely entertaining and insightful, even if it's revealed towards the end that the "real" author is the writer who is seeing Nina's mother. This late swerve into postmodernism indicates the felt need for a sort of insurance policy (if you're not convinced by Nina, guess what, I was bluffing all along) rather than an overriding interest in form. The story would be as strong without it.

Another story in that collection, "Lately", is modelled on Chekhov. It's fascinating to see what happens when Kureishi forces himself away from a single character and gives everyone a point of view. The texture lightens and the pace picks up, even if some of the statements about Life ("We have to care for one another. Yes! Otherwise we lose our humanity") resist transposition from Russia to an English seaside town. The relay-race method of constructing a story, though, isn't one that appeals to him except on this special occasion.

Not every experiment works. The various exercises in the grotesque, such as "The Tale of the Turd" and "The Flies", fall flat. If you know Gogol's "The Nose" then you're unlikely to be impressed by Kureishi's "The Penis".

Between Love in a Blue Time and his next collection, Midnight All Day (1999), Kureishi published the novel Intimacy, an account of marital desertion that was felt by some (notably the wife he had left in real life) to exploit private turmoil in the name of an inevitably partial honesty. The stories in Midnight All Day show a strong new interest in psychoanalysis – an interest culminating in his 2008 novel Something To Tell You, where the narrator is himself an analyst. Right to the end of the book the idea persists that therapy is a hobby for unfulfilled women, but a passionate interest fights the mistrust.

Analytic assumptions aren't necessarily compatible with fictional ones (they so relentlessly reduce difference to sameness), and they can be used defensively, as they are in "That Was Then", a story in which the narrator is reminded of past possibilities by an ex-lover, Natasha. The hero is a writer whose first success was a memoir of his father (Kureishi himself published such a book some years later). Natasha makes some strong points about the literary uses to which he put her: "You placed the madness outside yourself – in me, the half-addicted, promiscuous, self-devouring crazy girl. Isn't that misogyny?" His immediate reply is troubled: "I'm not sure." Later his rationalisation is more polished: "Someone in a piece of fiction is a dream figure… picked from one context and thrust into another, to serve some purpose. A tiny portion of them is used." It's as if he wants both to transgress and be forgiven.

All this probing is beside the point, since the story started with a piece of silvery subversiveness worthy of Adam Phillips, relegating Natasha to a safely closed category before she even appears: "We are unerring in our choice of lovers, particularly when we require the wrong person. There is an instinct, magnet or aerial which seeks the unsuitable. The wrong person is, of course, right for something – to punish, bully or humiliate us, let us down, leave us for dead…"

Issues of art and ownership are rehearsed very differently in the story "Sucking Stones". The situation, of an established writer cultivating an aspiring one, but only for usable details about her daily life as a teacher, seems simply satirical, the only question being which of the women will get the more severe drubbing, queenly Aurelia or desperate Marcia. Instead both are vindicated. Marcia sees that Aurelia is looking through her, "to the sentences and paragraphs she would make of her". This she finds admirable.

Marcia herself burns all her manuscripts, but this is not an act of despair. She is making a space, an important emptiness, "one she would not fill with other intoxications". She will wait for writing to come to her. This is a highly effective reversal of expectation, though a rather disconcerting proposition in its own right, that talent is only another name for the harnessing of ruthlessness.

The title piece of The Body (2002) is much the longest in the book, but not one of its successes. The brain-transplant plot (reminiscent of the Rock Hudson film Seconds) requires a thriller element which cuts in fitfully among the philosophical speculations. It's hard to accept that the hero's wife thinks he's in Australia for six months and out of reach (when in fact he's test-driving a new body), once the word "email" has been mentioned. The best passage of the novella is actually the meticulous description of another body, belonging to a woman from whom the hero has kept a distance sexually. Elsewhere in the book desire is praised for its powers of disruption, breaking up what's settled, but desire is also a furious blindness, and this contemplative note is new.

Of the other stories in The Body, my favourite is "Goodbye, Mother". It consists of the merest thread of storytelling, as a middle-aged man reluctantly takes his hated mother to visit her husband's grave, alternating with his reflections on his life and his marriage. A story so burdened with pain, acceptance and regret can (if you're not in the mood for it) resemble a thousand hours of therapy poured over a narrative like some sort of wisdom gravy, but it amounts to a notable victory for Hanif Kureishi over his inner enfant terrible.